COVID-19 misinformation is back
The big news out of Twitter today is an announcement that the site will no longer be enforcing its past rules against COVID-19 misinformation. The policy, which barred posting false information about the virus, masking, and vaccine use, was intended to reduce the number of pandemic deaths caused by conspiracy promoters and bad actors.
There is simply no question that pandemic disinformation led to countless deaths; a past Daily Kos series highlighted the direct connections between far-right pandemic conspiracy believers and their resulting deaths. Whether Twitter’s action was intended as a generous public service during a public health emergency or was instituted because company lawyers believed Twitter’s rank as one of the top distributors of pandemic hoax claims was going to get the company sued into oblivion is immaterial.
But that was then and this is now, and Elon Musk’s mass firings have left the company so gutted that there’s simply not enough remaining staff to enforce the policy. That means conspiracy cranks will now be able to promote false information with abandon.
Twitter’s teams tasked with preventing the spread of child pornography have been wiped out
It’s not just COVID-19 hoaxes that are coming back to Elon’s Twitter. Genuinely criminal activity is likely to skyrocket as well, including the distribution of child pornography. A new WIRED investigation reports that just one full-time Twitter employee remains on Twitter’s staff tasked with enforcing the company’s ban on child sexual abuse material in the Asia Pacific region, a region that includes 59 million Twitter users in Japan alone. The previous team’s role was to coordinate with child safety organizations in order to automatically block previously discovered abusive content.
WIRED reports that in the last half of 2021, Twitter suspended “more than half a million accounts” for sharing child sexual abuse material. How long will Twitter’s lone remaining anti-child-pornography staffer remain, now that they’ve been tasked with singlehandedly moderating the whole of the Asian Twitter population?
It’s not just Asia, either. Bloomberg reports Twitter anti-child-exploitation teams have been “decimated” globally.
Terrorism
That’s not the only criminal content that Musk’s new plan could be unleashing. The Guardian reports that newly uploaded footage of the 2019 white supremacist terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, was removed by Twitter only after the New Zealand government itself alerted the company to its presence.
Twitter had previously pledged to block footage of the murders, which were filmed by the terrorist in order to encourage similar acts by others.
Twitter layoffs have fouled paychecks for remaining workers
It’s not just the moderation and tech teams that have been devastated by Musk’s performative “business” tantrums. Some salaried Twitter employees have been hit with bank overdraft fees after Twitter delayed payroll checks without warning or explanation.
Whoops. Rather than the collapse of Twitter’s existing revenue streams, it’s more likely that this has to do with the recent mass resignations of Twitter’s payroll and financial staff, the result of a Musk demand two weeks ago that the company’s remaining employees either resign or sign a document promising to … work harder.
This guy just can’t help himself. Everything he touches is coming up gold, eh?
As for Musk himself?
While all of this is going on, ultrabillionaire Elon Musk is tweeting far-right memes and picking fights with Apple and other high-profile companies.
Yes, Elon has given up any pretense of making Twitter a brand-safe advertising haven. Instead we’re getting whatever this is.
Yeah. Yeah, that says “brand stability.” A guy who drinks four Diet Cokes before lying down next to his two bedside guns, one of which appears to be designed to take out George Washington. Sure, whatever.
Not to worry! Our man here is as stable as stable gets!
Okay, $8chan.
He’s purrfectly stable. He just happens to be wallowing in far-right memes and fascist rhetoric after announcing site amnesty for far-right hate accounts. WHY AREN’T YOU COMING BACK, ADVERTISERS?
The bulk of Elon’s time, however, has been spent not on recovering Twitter’s ability to respond to child sexual abuse or on fishing for far-right praise, but on personally calling the chief executives of other companies to “berate” them for scaling down advertising on Twitter, despite firing so many Twitter staffers that “many agencies no longer have any point of contact at the company” to begin with.
Rather than fixing that, he’s now all-in on a new tirade against Apple for Not Paying Him Enough Money. He’s quite convinced that, as a billionaire, other American companies refusing to spend money on his company is a violation of his ‘free speech’ rights—and absolutely nobody has been able to convince him otherwise.
Musk claims to be baffled by Apple’s possible removal of the Twitter app from its highly profitable App Store, but he’s either lying or even more incompetent than we thought. (The answer is always “both,” if you’re still confused about that.) Apple has a long history of removing apps that run afoul of App Store rules prohibiting pornography, criminal conduct, hate speech, and other not-safe-for-children content, and Musk’s new vow to reinstate Twitter users who were previously banned for hate speech and similar content puts Twitter squarely at odds with Apple’s own policies.
Not that anyone can calm Frothy McTunnelboy’s rampage on the subject.
Now, none of us here are smart enough to blow $44 billion on a money-losing company, then dismantle it and throw each component in a wood chipper, but nonetheless this does not seem to be a winning strategy.
Elon: I’m inviting all the banned hate groups and white supremacists to rejoin Twitter, I’ve fired almost everyone in the company tasked with preventing our site from displaying child pornography, and my new plan includes hosting adult videos for money.
Advertisers: But we don’t want our brands to be displayed next to child porn and Nazi calls for genocide.
Elon: THIS IS A VIOLATION OF MY RIGHTS AND, NAY, AN ASSAULT ON AMERICA ITSELF. YOU WILL SUPPORT MY NAZI AND CHILD PORN SITE OR I WILL UNLEASH MY GREASY ADMIRERS UPON YOU ALL.
So then, what’s today’s update on Twitter’s overall stability?
• Inside Twitter, moderation and other key functions continue to collapse
• Advertisers don’t want to be associated with a site that welcomes hate speech with open arms, as Musk is doing with his mass-amnesty-for-hate-speech order.
• Musk’s directives are in fact quite likely to result in Twitter’s app being pulled from the Apple ecosystem because Apple has very clear moderation requirements that Musk has already promised to break.
• Musk isn’t paying attention to any of Twitter’s actual crises, and instead is focused on gaining cheap praise from the right while berating the companies that were once Twitter’s top revenue streams.
Again, the odds that Twitter will on some upcoming day simply cease to function are increasing by the day; there are enormous business risks associated with firing all the people who actually know how your technology works. The Apple threat is also real, because Apple doesn’t host Nazis, actual “free speech” principles give them every right to not host Nazis, and Elon’s announcement that he’s now going to host Nazis is incontrovertibly at odds with Apple’s long-specified rule set. Google could well follow.
If Musk’s team of gathered ‘yes’ men can’t stanch the bleeding here, we could be looking at a faster Twitter collapse than any of us predicted. Yikes.
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